In late August, I did harvest honey from our beehive. The day before harvest, I added a bee escape board. It is a one way maze for the bees to exit safely from the honey super so when a beekeeper goes to extract the box the next day, there are hardly any bees inside the box. When I did take the box off the next day, there were only about 2 dozen bees left - easy enough to just brush off the frames. However, I did not try to harvest honey right next to the hive - that would be suicide and mayhem as the bees would surely get back inside. Instead, I used temporary boxes and covers to take the honey super to another part of the yard (so I can brush the bees off without taking them inside the house). It was surprisingly easy to get that part done, especially as I was working by myself. I was able to take 6 of the 10 frames for honey extraction. The rest of the frames with uncapped honey went back to the bees. I also gave them back all used frames, bowls, or plates that I used that may have been covered with miniscule amounts of honey, which they then slurped up and took back into their hive. They are the ultimate recyclers! In the end, we got 15 pounds of honey. It was a dark, amber color and rich tasting like a sweet caramel. Since I didn't have a fancy extractor, I used what I had on hand in the kitchen - a bread knife to cut away the wax cappings, a metal spatula to just scrape off the honeycomb off the frames, pots and pans to catch the oozing honey, and miscellaneous strainers to get the chunks of comb out. Ultimately, I learned that the wax will float to the top and then I just had to skim off the most chunkiest of wax. If I had more frames to extract, this process would have been tedious but since it was my first time and I wanted to experiment, it was just fine. The total time to let gravity pull the honey out was about 24 hours. I would crush and strain several times just to get as much honey as I could. Whatever I was unable to use, I gave to the bees and my leftover wax was rinsed in water and the honey-water given to the bees too. The harvest yielded over a pound of raw beeswax too.
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| The frames, full of honey |
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| Stewart and I uncapping the frames with a bread knife |
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| The uncapped frames allow the honey to drip into the bucket |
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| All of the honeycomb and honey prior to straining |
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| The chunks of wax were strained using a basic colander and pots |
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| Once all the biggest pieces of wax were removed, it was bottled into sterilized mason jars. |
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